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Finding love in a hopeless reno: Reno Rookie

Three tips for staying on your partner's good side through a stressful home-renovation project.

Matthew Chung and his wife, Gloria, have been renovating their east end home for two years. (Aaron Harris / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Matthew ChungSpecial to the Star

Fri., Dec. 30, 2016

For the past 24 months I’ve been trying to impress my wife, one adequately done renovation project at a time.

I’m married to a beautiful and talented woman who handles a power drill with confidence and can paint a wall with precision — which ratcheted up the pressure on me to be as proficient at renovating.

So I took the lead on do-it-yourself projects on our east end home, a challenge to myself to learn new skills and prove to her I could fulfil a vague concept of what it means to be a grown-up. I imagined I’d get better with practice and hoped that my wife would view my miss-hit nails as a sort of love letter to her.

But I soon realized that we would have to look at those “love letters” for a very long time, and eventually even I would see them for the eyesores they were. And with some projects lasting weeks, it would be naive to think I would tinker away by myself with the house in a constant state of construction, without needing the help of my wife.

In reality I’ve depended on my wife’s input, assistance and sometimes her labour to get through renos and, when she isn’t in the trenches with me, I look to her for reassurance that I’m not completely missing the mark.

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Apparently, renovating as a couple is not to be taken lightly — home renovations make 12 per cent of people consider divorce, according to a survey by home improvement website Houzz.

While the foundation of our relationship remains strong, I think we’ve had to develop strategies to minimize disagreements. Here are three suggestions I have for staying on your partner’s good side during a project:

Give each other space. I’ve found my wife and I work best together when we have responsibility for our own part of the project. For example, she measures and sketches out how to position the mouldings on the ceiling; I cut and nail them in place. Or I use the paint roller while she uses a brush to paint the trim (because the fine detail is not my strong suit). This saves us from tripping over each other or debating the best way to do a task. Better yet, I’d suggest you try and convince/bribe a friend to lend a hand. No guarantee you’ll finish the job any faster or the result will be any better, but I do guarantee it’ll put less strain on your relationship.

Keep yourself busy. To ensure resentment doesn’t build up, you’ll want to match your partner’s work rate, even if the work you’re doing isn’t advancing the renovation project. For instance, the Sunday afternoon my wife was figuring out the aforementioned ceiling mouldings, we agreed there wasn’t much I could contribute. But rather than sit back and watch TV, I spent that afternoon doing our taxes, running loads of laundry and cooked us a meal so at least there’d be fewer tasks she might feel she had to pick up later.

Keep laughing. Renovating is hard and scary. Trying to see the humour in discovering there’s a giant hole where you’d expect to find drywall or that none of your walls are square will go some way to keeping your partner in a good mood and ensuring that when, at the end of the day you put the tools back in the shed, you don’t have to stay out there for the rest of the night.

Matthew Chung, 33, is a communications manager living in and attempting to renovate his first house in Toronto’s east end. You can follow his progress on Instagram @mjechung.

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